Bashir, she thought he’d said. His wife wore the headscarf the Muslims liked and a brown dress that covered her from neck to toes. It was a hot June day, but the woman didn’t seem to mind. Agnes supposed she was used to the heat.
Bashir visited again the next day, without his agent or his wife, but with his tape measure. He must have liked the measurements because two days after that her agent called back and said Bashir had offered to buy the place. At the asking price, and for cash.
“Said they’re looking to have kids and they thought it would be perfect,” the agent said. “They even want the furniture, the rugs, all of it. They want to move right in, and they’ll pay another forty thousand for all your stuff. It’s like hitting the lottery, this kind of offer. It never happens like this.”
Agnes agreed that the deal seemed too good to be true, especially since the furniture in the house was a little bit raggedy and not worth anything like $40,000. She kept waiting for the catch. But there wasn’t one. The papers were signed in under a month. Her first bit of luck since that day on the road. She moved into a first-floor apartment in Ithaca with Damon and tried to forget the house and everything else that had been her life before the accident. She never went back to the place. She did see it again, though, on television. And when the reporters started calling, one after the next, to ask about it, she couldn’t say she was surprised.
Not when she thought of Bashir on her porch, scanning the hills with binoculars.
THE STABLE behind the Repard house still had the cheery red paint job. Inside, however, the place looked more like a high-end machine shop.
The strangest-looking piece of equipment sat in the very center of the stable, a black block four feet high, three feet wide, and three feet long. Handles and valves jutted from its sides, and a burnished door of inch-thick steel capped it. It looked like a washing machine built by the devil. It was a vacuum furnace, a masterpiece of engineering, able to heat metal ingots to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit in an oxygen-free vacuum.
Beside the furnace was a metal lathe. Beside that, an open gas-fired furnace, where Bashir heated and shaped the molds that would be used to cast the uranium at the heart of the bomb. Against the back wall, a liquid nitrogen plant, essentially a powerful refrigerator that produced five liters per hour of super-cold liquid. Next to the nitrogen plant, arranged on hooks and metal shelves, Bashir’s work clothes and other personal equipment: a fire- resistant coat, long rubber boots and gloves, a plastic face shield and goggles. A respirator mask. Heavy steel tongs and clamps for picking up buckets of molten metal. Three fire extinguishers. A horror movie’s worth of saws: a table saw, a chain saw, a diamond-studded rotating saw capable of cutting steel or uranium. Outside and behind, a Caterpillar generator, so that Bashir wouldn’t have to draw electricity from the power grid to run the equipment.
Bashir had bought most of the stuff on eBay and from machinery supply companies across the Northeast. He’d taken care never to approach the same dealer twice. No special licenses or permits were required for any of the tools, but Bashir didn’t want anyone to ask why he was putting together a factory in his backyard.
Buying the vacuum furnace was more complicated. It was more than $50,000, and mainly used in steel mills and high-end university labs. After talking with Sayyid Nasiji, Bashir decided that the best way to get the furnace without attracting attention was to import it from China. American laws strictly regulated the
But the laws said nothing about the import of advanced equipment. No one had considered the possibility that terrorists working on American soil might look outside the United States for the equipment they needed. After a few hours of Internet research and four phone calls to China, Bashir ordered the vacuum furnace online. It arrived two months later at a warehouse in Elmira, no questions asked.
BY DAY, Bashir was a general surgeon in Corning, a town of eleven thousand in upstate New York, 250 miles northwest of New York City. He was Egyptian, the only son of an upper-middle-class family in Cairo. He’d gotten stellar grades at Cairo University, graduated in three years at twenty-one, and come to the United States for medical school and residency, both at Ohio State. At twenty-eight, his residency complete, he returned to Egypt to find a bride. He stayed just a few months in Cairo before coming back to Corning — and buying the Repard house.
That bare-bones resume, though accurate, left out some facts that surely would have interested the CIA. When Bashir was eleven, his father died. With money tight, his mother sent him to live with her half sister Noor. Noor’s husband, Ayman Is’mail, owned a trucking company — and secretly was a devout member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that favored turning Egypt into a strict Islamic state. Ayman and Noor, who had no children, raised Bashir as their own, inculcating him with the Muslim Brotherhood’s beliefs.
Ayman especially hated Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president. “A pharaoh,” he told Bashir. “With his imperial court and his crumbling empire. Look at how he treats his people. How he locks up anyone who opposes him. And do you know who’s behind it all?”
“No, uncle.”
“You do. You’ve heard me give this speech a hundred times. Tell me.”
“The Americans.”
Ayman nodded. “The Americans. They say they want democracy for everyone. But if we Egyptians demand leaders who will stand up to them, they put us down. Who do you think pays for the prisons and the Mukhabarat?”
“The Americans?”
“Just so.”
Ayman was careful to avoid associating with the Brotherhood in public. But when Bashir was eighteen and just about to enter Cairo University, the Mukhabarat arrested Ayman in a raid on a Brotherhood meeting in Cairo. For two weeks, Bashir and Noor did not know what had happened to him. Finally they learned that the police had sent him to the notorious Tora prison complex, fifteen miles south of Cairo. Even after they found out, another week passed before the lawyer they’d hired convinced the Mukhabarat to let Bashir visit the prison.
The concrete-walled meeting room at Tora where Bashir waited for Ayman was windowless and stifling, more than a hundred degrees. The stench of sewage soaked the air, so heavy that after a few minutes Bashir found himself pinching his nose and breathing through his mouth. Outside the room, men shouted at one another endlessly, a cacophony of voices that rose and fell as erratically as wind whistling across the Sahara. About an hour into his wait, Bashir heard, or thought he heard, a high eerie voice screaming like a teakettle’s whistle. But after a few seconds, the scream stopped. It never did return, and eventually Bashir wondered if he’d imagined it.
Bashir waited two hours for the guards to bring Ayman in. When they finally did, Bashir almost wished he’d had to wait longer. The three weeks Ayman spent in jail had not been kind to him. He limped into the concrete- walled meeting room, hands cuffed behind his back, stomach poking sadly out of a cheap white T-shirt a size too small. Ayman, who had taken such care of his appearance. His skin had the grayish pallor of a plate of hummus that had sat too long in the sun. Pushed along by a guard, he shuffled to the narrow wooden bench where Bashir sat and straddled it uncomfortably.
“Won’t you uncuff him? Please?” Bashir said to the guard. In response, the man pointed to a hand-lettered Arabic sign taped awkwardly to the wall:
“Look at him. He’s no threat.”
“Even so, removing the handcuffs is complicated.” Complicated. A code word for a bribe.
“A hundred pounds,” Ayman said under his breath.
Bashir had known he would need to pay bribes to get into Tora, even with the official approval from Mukhabarat headquarters. He’d come prepared with 400 Egyptian pounds, about $75. But he had foolishly spent the last of his money for the chance to bring a bottle of Ayman’s blood pressure medicine into the waiting room. He had nothing left for this guard. He shook his head. The guard walked out, slamming the door behind him.
“Are you all right, uncle?”
“I miss my cigarettes. And my pills.”
“No cigarettes, but the pills I have. What happened to your leg?”
Ayman laughed. “I banged it on a door. So they tell me.”
